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Thinking about trying out radeonhd. A few questions.

02-24-2010, 12:07 AM

Recently I've been trying to get xvidcap/recordmydesktop/every other screencasting software that supports sound to function well enough to be able to record dosbox games running at 640x480. I have an HD4890, 8 gig of ram, Phenom II X4 955 black edition (3.2 ghz quad core), one would think it could record 640x480 video with a dosbox game playing, but it can't. recordmydesktop makes dosbox studder/lag like crazy, xvidcap almost works, it records at 15fps except during any "demanding sceens" like fades, but messes up the sound a bit and crashes randomly (supposedly a bug with xcb).

Would the 2d acceleration in radeonhd help programs like xvidcap/recordmydesktop? I'm currently using cat 10.2 (I haven't tried enabling direct2d... yet) with Opensuse 11.1 upgraded to KDE 4.4. Which leads me to my next question.

Anyone know the best way to upgrade the radeonhd driver on Opensuse 11.1? The newest one in the repositories is 1.2.4, which is just old enough to not support 2d accel on r7XX cards. I was planning on following the installation instructions on the x.org page, but if there's an easier way.

Also, if anyone has any suggestions as to improving performance, like any xorg.conf settings for fglrx, in xvidcap/recordmydesktop, feel free to suggest away.

Comment

Try making your captures in a raw or very low compression format. The capture size will be huge, but it will be less demanding on the CPU than H263 (xvid) is. After the capture you can transcode it into a more sensible form -- like H264. You can use mencoder for that. I also suggest capturing to a different physical disk than where the OS or game are running from.

And finally, as a last resort, you can play the game over TVOUT and use a dedicated video capture device to record it.

Comment

I tried vnc2flv, during recording it seemed to work great, there was no slowdown during fades, however, when I looked at the video, it had dropped a lot of frames.

I didn't know dosbox had a video capture feature. Tried it out and it works great, except I can't record commentary in the same go, so I'd have to record later or with a separate program. Doable, but I'll continue to search for a more "all in one" solution. Thanks for that info though.

I'm fairly certain recordmydesktop records raw then transcodes after stopping. However I may try hooking up one of my external HDs (1394, not usb ).

The "DownloadFromScreen" is something in the open source drivers right?
Now I've gotta find the best way to upgrade the xorg drivers on Opensuse 11.1, I had checked before and the version of radeon that ships with Opensuse 11.1 didn't support a 4890.

Comment

Can't see a way to edit my previous post so...
I upgraded xorg via a yast repository and am successfully running radeon. I did some searching here and added a few settings to xorg.conf (things like EXA, DRI, AccelDFS, DynamicClocks) but don't really know if they're doing anything. I couldn't find a "Tweak your xorg.conf for radeon" guide of any sort, so just sorta winged it.
Anywho, I tried recordmydesktop, well, qt-recordmydesktop, and it looked like it was working well, but it end up dropping frames worse than with fglrx. However, I tried xvidcap again and it can record a full 15 fps. I haven't done extensive testing, but I'm hoping the new libXCB won't interfere and cause random xvidcap gui crashes.

So, thanks to everyone who suggested things and feel free to post any recommended xorg.conf options I should set or avoid.